New Research Shows That Time Travel Is Mathematically Possible

If you could travel through all of space and time, where would you go?

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Bending Time

Even before Einstein theorized that time is relative and flexible, humanity had already been imagining the possibility of time travel. In fact, science fiction is filled with time travelers. Some use metahuman abilities to do so, but most rely on a device generally known as a time machine. Now, two physicists think that it’s time to bring the time machine into the real world — sort of.

“People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it,” Ben Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician from the University of British Columbia, said in a UBC news release. “But, mathematically, it is possible.”

Feasible but Not Possible. Yet.

“My model of a time machine uses the curved space-time to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line,” Tippet explained. “That circle takes us back in time.” Simply put, their model assumes that time could curve around high-mass objects in the same way that physical space does in the universe.

For Tippet and Tsang, a TARDIS is a space-time geometry “bubble” that travels faster than the speed of light. “It is a box which travels ‘forwards’ and then ‘backwards’ in time along a circular path through spacetime,” they wrote in their paper.

Unfortunately, it’s still not possible to construct such a time machine. “While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials — which we call exotic matter — to bend space-time in these impossible ways, but they have yet to be discovered,” Tippet explained.